D.Mont.: “‘Humpty Dumpty’ rule of meaning” of exigency?

Police entry for a drug overdose is an exigency. United States v. Van Pelt, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 211734 (D.Mont. Nov. 2, 2021). And there’s this:

The motion to suppress evidence which defendant seeks in this case exemplifies the tension that exists between the obligations of law enforcement officers, their duties to the public, and the protections afforded any individual by virtue of the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. The Fourth Amendment requires a warrant before law enforcement officers conduct a search. But that seemingly simple legal notion is not so simple. The shroud of interpretive smog concerning the Fourth Amendment is replete with multiple exceptions that the government argues apply to the search here: exigent circumstances, plain view, and inevitable discovery, among others. As Lewis Carroll noted in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—nothing more nor less.” Applying exceptions to the Fourth Amendment in light of the record means only what the court says it means, as interpreted by the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit, “nothing more nor less.” Ultimately the application of any or all those exceptions is tantamount to the “Humpty Dumpty” rule of meaning—or, determining what is reasonable in applying the Fourth Amendment to the circumstances here means trying to ferret out what is reasonable when police are called to assist in a medical emergency caused by an overdose of unknown drugs and the parameters of searching without a warrant under those facts. In this case the search was reasonable as explained below.